Saturday, 21 March 2026

Paper vs Electronic Notes

 OK, for real: paper is extremely hard to beat. Paper has specific qualities: it has a higher energy cost to commit things to paper or rewrite them and you are always constrained by physical space. These might seem like disadvantages but the effects are positive: I am a firm believer in the effort principle (it's shown that students that write things down retain information better than those that write electronic notes), and you are naturally encouraged to be concise and clear.

Physical material can be physically organised - less-used stuff can be moved completely out of your field of view, you can quickly learn a specific and natural sequence of movements to access the information you need. The workflow of annotating paper notes is also just.... nicer. A mouse can never be as dextrous as the pencil. Going keyboard-only helps but maybe we don't want to learn Vim just to run elfgames.

If you're going to go electronic it needs to be because paper either isn't an option at all (impractical to physically bring the stuff with you) or you need electronic features like hypertext, word-search, indexing, file-linking, or versioning.

So personally: I'm leaning into the electronic stuff but with the mindset that you need to invest heavily in the underlying skillset+tools to make it good.

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Paper vs Electronic Notes

 OK, for real: paper is extremely hard to beat. Paper has specific qualities: it has a higher energy cost to commit things to paper or rewri...